Though history books may say otherwise, policing in the United States has its roots in the slave patrols in the South. The institution of policing, and the larger justice system, must reconcile its past in order to evolve away from its racist roots.
For anyone interested in a deeper dive, I encourage you to listen to this podcast miniseries in release order beginning at June 16 2020. If you listen out of order you’re going to have a bad time.
It details the history of US policing from its origins right up through the George Floyd protests, with references cited along the way. Fans may recognize Robert Evans as the host (from Behind the Bastards among many other things), and he’s joined for this series by rap artist Propaganda.
The two of them struggle a bit to get their co-host chemistry working at the beginning, but if you can look past that, it’s a fascinating listen, and the facts they cite are well documented throughout.
Slave patrols and Jim Crow are really just details along the way regarding the ongoing corruption and abuse of power rampant in US policing.
Law enforcement has been around since the dawn of laws. Jim Crow is millennia late to be the origin.
Clearly the article is not talking about the global history of policing, it’s talking about American history of policing. You can infer that because Jim Crow laws are American laws. They didn’t have Jim Crow in Sweden.
As for the history of American policing, again, the article acknowledges that American policing has 2 lineages that merged over time.
There are two narratives of how U.S. policing developed. Both are true.
The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing.
Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.There’s no one “origin” to American policing.
